Stead has created a fascinating precursor to Bellow’s garrulous heroes and the little boy who takes on Wall Street in...
A sprawling character study that dissects a businessman working in Manhattan, bedding every woman he can, and talking incessantly, in this reissue of a 1948 work.
Ten years before Australia-born Stead (The Puzzleheaded Girl, 1967, etc.) published this New York–based business novel, she brought out the 800-page House of All Nations, which showed how a Paris bank touched many lives. This novel anatomizes a single character who does the same. Stead introduces cotton trader Robert Grant in May 1941 in a fur showroom, a sideline of his. There he meets the book’s other main character, a woman on her uppers named Barbara Kent, who will soon join Grant for one of his many trysts (the title is his euphemism for these compulsive quickies). They will remain stormily connected even when she entangles him as correspondent in a divorce. In this “life of bars, taxis, and bedrooms,” they and others converse in the slang-rich patois Hammett perfected and Hollywood borrowed in the Thin Man series. When he is not serially seducing, Grant looks after his interests on the Cotton Exchange, where he can make $30,000 daily, and in real estate, with some profiteering on a war barely glimpsed by this set. Fairly straight in business, Grant cheats, connives, reneges, and skimps in his dealings with lovers, friends, and relations. He ignores his wealthy wife in Boston and cajoles and mistreats his older son. He’s trying to get his life story told in a book or play, the source of much humor. And always in this perhaps overlong book there is his torrential talk, an oceanic spew that lies, bullies, justifies, wheedles, backtracks, and constantly reiterates pet phrases and idées fixes that suggest a mad salesman’s spiel. Callous, comical, loathsome, and tiresome, Grant also, as the David Malouf introduction notes, can sometimes stir sympathy thanks to Stead’s artistry.
Stead has created a fascinating precursor to Bellow’s garrulous heroes and the little boy who takes on Wall Street in Gaddis’ JR.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-925355-72-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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